Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Source: Warner Bros.

With his new science-fiction satire Mickey 17, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is back with his first movie since he swept the Academy Awards for 2019 with his lucid-looking class-conflict film Parasite.

Granted, nobody writing in English has yet put forward a convincing explanation of what Parasite meant to say about the condition of the working class in South Korea. For example, why is the poor family defeated by simple paying tasks such as folding pizza boxes, but when they begin to infiltrate the CEO’s family by posing as American-educated art therapists and the like, they suddenly become as competent as the Mission: Impossible squad?

But, whatever…from the perspective of a half decade later, the film was clearly a high-class work of art. I can remember scenes from it as clearly as I can remember segments from Coen brothers movies, which is high praise from me.

Consider, for instance, the elegance of the rich family’s modernist mansion, which Bong largely concocted in CGI. If he hadn’t become Korea’s top director, Bong might have instead become its best architect.

Both Bong’s innate artistry and his progressive politics come with a blue-chip pedigree: His father was chairman of the art department at the National Film Institute, and his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea.

Bong was bred to be a great artist.

Economist Robin Hanson has probably come closest to explaining Bong’s masterpiece with his comparison of the upscale appeal of Parasite to the downscale appeal of Joker, the mere thought of which, as you may recall, terrified high-toned folk into fearing that low-caste incels would run amok during Joker’s opening night. (Reminder: That didn’t actually happen.)

More than a half decade later, Bong is finally following up Parasite with his $120 million-budgeted Mickey 17, a sci-fi comedy in the acrid tradition of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall.

Why is Mickey 17 being released in early March rather than in the fall awards season like Parasite (which debuted Oct. 11, 2019) or in the summer blockbuster season?

Because movie studio executives are pretty good at their jobs of anticipating what audiences will like. Mickey 17 made a ho-hum $19 million in its first weekend. Not awful, but pretty run-of-the-mill for a new sci-fi movie.

It’s Bong’s first English-language movie since Snowpiercer in 2013. That sci-fi drama was set in a postapocalyptic ice-covered world after an attempt to mitigate global warming succeeded all too well, so humanity’s few survivors endlessly ride, for unexplained reasons, in a train that roars around the ice-covered world without ever stopping.

Snowpiercer was a huge hit in South Korea, perhaps because you can’t take a train out of the country due to having oceans on three sides and minefields on the other, so Bong’s concept of limitless rail travel galvanized his countrymen. Audiences in the rest of the world, however, thought Snowpiercer was kind of stupid.

Mickey 17’s premise is also rather dumb, but at least the film is more fun than Snowpiercer.

It’s 2054 and mass space travel has been opened up to other worlds. A twice-defeated American demagogue modeled on you-know-who, played by Mark Ruffalo, is packing his cultists into an overcrowded starship to lead them on a mass migration to settle the wintry planet of Niflheim (named after Norse mythology’s realm of primordial ice), which he advertises to them as a “pure, white planet.”

So, it sounds like Mickey 17 is going to be about white Zionism. And a few scenes in Bong’s herky-jerk screenplay gesture in that direction, such as a protracted dialogue in which the leader praises a pretty minor character’s superior genes, but then she’s forgotten throughout most of the movie.

Instead, Mickey 17 is about a second epochal invention of the next 29 years besides interstellar flight: You can now print out an exact copy of a human being at age 30 and upload all his memories and personality traits into his brain so he can immediately start functioning as well as did his original.

(By the way, I hate to disappoint anybody, but this is not how cloning humans would work. If you clone an individual, he’s not suddenly in his prime with all his skills. Instead, he’s a zygote requiring decades of expensive nurture.)

Obviously, duplicating fully functioning mature astronauts could prove useful in manning the crew of a hazardous space voyage: You just train one John Glenn-quality astronaut up to a basic level and then replicate him as many times as you need.

But instead, in Mickey 17, the Trump-like leader has the opposite brainstorm: Instead of cloning Buzz Lightyear, we’ll take the least qualified passenger, Mickey, a hapless schmo with no qualifications, who, to escape loan sharks on Earth (in Bong’s movies about the class struggle, the oppressed protagonists are not proletarians but debt-ridden failed capitalists; likewise, the hero of South Korea’s popular Squid Game is an indebted gambling addict), volunteered for the post of “expendable.”

Every time Mickey gets killed in some hazardous experiment or repair job, we immediately print out another Mickey, upload his memories, and dispatch him on another lethal task. This premise might raise far-reaching technological, metaphysical, and spiritual questions about identity. But Bong is too focused on gleefully dreaming up another way to kill off his hero to worry about that, any more than Chuck Jones endured sleepless nights fretting over what it would really be like to live in Wile E. Coyote’s universe.

As you may recall, this type of videogame respawning was already exploited in Tom Cruise’s fine 2014 sci-fi action comedy Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live Die Repeat). And critics of that movie pointed out its similarities to Groundhog Day. The basic concept traces back to Valhalla.

The new film is narrated largely in flashback by the seventeenth Mickey as he recounts his sixteen previous deaths. Sure, it’s a lousy job, Mickey 17 reflects in voice-over, but whaddaya whaddaya?

The best thing about Mickey 17 is English actor Robert Pattinson’s endearing mid-20th-century American working-class loser’s accent. Contemporary American actors, even big lovable galoots such as Chris Pratt, have trouble doing old-fashioned American accents anymore because they grew up speaking with feminized 21st-century uptalk.

In contrast, Brits and Aussies learned American accents not on the playground but from watching classic videos. Hence, Pattinson’s Mickey voice is modeled on Steve Buscemi in Fargo and on the dim-witted but good-natured cat Stimpy on the sinister 1990s kids’ body-horror cartoon Ren & Stimpy. In turn, Stimpy’s voice was based on that of Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.

Pattinson became a tween heartthrob seventeen years ago in the Mormon vampire movie Twilight, but he has since wisely focused on extending his career in movies that appeal more to his own sex, such as 2022’s The Batman. As I’ve often pointed out, you can become a star, briefly, by enthralling the opposite sex, but to enjoy a Clint Eastwood-length career, you’ve quickly got to switch to being a favorite of your own sex.

Other than the terrific Pattinson, most of the actors in Mickey 17 are worse than you’d expect in an Oscar-winning director’s movie. Mark Ruffalo, who has been nominated for four Oscars, is normally reliable, but he’s completely defeated at trying to bring any credibility or laughs to Bong’s inept satire of Trump.

The usual problem satirists have with Trump is that he’s one of them: He’s self-aware that he’s playing a comic character. Bong, being from the other side of the planet, appears especially clueless about making fun of Americans.

Thus, the comparably skillful Toni Collette is likewise defeated by her embarrassing role as the politician’s domineering evangelical Christian wife, who has a fixation with sauces. Why sauces? Are sauces considered hilarious in South Korea? The reviewer in Salon praised Bong for ripping into “white people’s disgusting obsession with putrid sauces.” But I dunno…

My guess is that Bong is simply ill-equipped to satirize America.

On the other hand, South Korea is a fascinating country that has been speed-running postmodernity.

South Korea is, objectively, a remarkably successful state, with young South Koreans towering a half foot in height above their grandparents and scoring comparably higher on IQ exams. And they’ve overtaken Japan in popular culture influence. But their achievements seem to have come at some psychic cost. Traveler Chris Arnade writes:

I love Korea, but they have the highest suicide rate in the developed world, there is an ongoing gender war that makes the U.S. look like a cup of ambrosia, and they seem to have decided, as a country, to never have another kid ever again. While that might not entirely be because they worked their asses off for the past sixty years to catch up to the Japanese, and in the process forgot to relax and enjoy life every now and then, it probably has something to do with it.

South Korea’s total fertility rate of births per woman per lifetime hit a world record low of 0.72 in 2023 but fortunately ticked slightly upward to 0.75 in 2024. Still, 2024’s rate is only 37 percent of the replacement rate of about 2.05 babies per woman. So South Korea would drop from 50 million Koreans today to 7 million after two more generations.

Perhaps Bong should focus his considerable gifts not on poking fun at the failures of Americans, but at his own people, who face novel problems in the history of humanity?